A recent survey from Zillow and Ipsos seems to capture the reality of buying a home in today's Toronto market.
And that reality is filled with a lack of confidence. In fact, the survey found that 70% of Toronto residents are concerned rising home prices will prevent them from being able to afford the home they want. But while less than a quarter of Torontonians surveyed felt they could afford the home they actually want, 83% still view homeownership as a good investment -- leading to the obvious question, is owning a bad home still a good thing?
READ: 5 Condos You Can Buy in Toronto Below the Current Average Price
In today's market, the answer to that question lingers somewhere between probably and definitely.
The survey also found that 84% of Torontonians believe the City's housing market is in a bubble, and at risk for a correction. A view that aligns with several other reports that place Toronto's bubble risk as one of the highest in the world right now. (According to the survey, this perception drops for other Canadian cities, even for Vancouver at 68%, which is a greater distance than most aforementioned reports put between YYZ and YVR.)
More than any other stat the survey found, however, the staggering 94% of Torontonians who experience barriers to homeownership hits, well, home the hardest. Toronto's housing crisis has reached a level that affords only the absolute wealthiest members of the City to enter into the housing market without hesitation. Of the barriers identified in the survey, the most common were:
Perhaps the above findings are why a lot of millennials are moving out of Toronto right now.
READ: The Best Canadian Cities for Buying an Apartment on a Single Income
About the Study
These are some of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted between September 24 and October 8, 2019, on behalf of Zillow. For this survey, a sample of 1,503 Canadians aged 18+ (including 821 Toronto CMA residents) was interviewed online via the Ipsos I-Say panel. Quota sampling and weighting were employed to balance demographics to ensure that the sample's composition reflects that of the adult population according to Census data and to provide results intended to approximate the sample universe. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within ±2.9 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadian adults been polled. Results from the Toronto CMA sample are accurate to within ±3.9 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to coverage error, and measurement error.
